This Time It’s War: The Best Alien Fan Art Ever

It’s April 26, and just like we nerds like to do every May the 4th with Star Wars, we’ve set this day aside to celebrate the Alien Universe. If you’re not sure why; LV-426/Acheron was the name of the moon where the Xenomorphs were found in Alien, and battled by the Colonial Marines in Aliens. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, then kudos to you for sticking around this long to try to figure it out!

“In space, no one can hear you scream,” and the inky, blackness of space had never felt quite so cold and lonely and terrifying as it did in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien. Part monster movie, part slasher horror, part locked door mystery, part human drama, Alien made working on a spaceship in the future seem as mundane as working on a slow-moving ocean freighter. Gone were the ray guns and pristine, sterilized flying saucers and starships of the science fiction worlds audiences had grown accustom to or perhaps even bored by from the past. The Nostromo was grimy and sweaty and cluttered and its crew seemed more like truckers, space truckers, than astronauts or action heroes. If the universe of 1977’s Star Wars felt lived in, then the universe in Alien felt positively run down. And the humdrum nature of the world they occupied only served to make the extraordinary seem that much more unsettling to the natural order once things started going off the rails.

And then seven years later, James Cameron made Aliens and blew the doors off what we thought we expected from a sci-fi movie, as well as the Alien franchise, once again! Obviously, I assume you’ve seen both of these movies, but if you haven’t, I couldn’t possibly recommend them highly enough. They’re both incredible in very different ways and really show how much room there is to try different things within the confines of one movie universe.

If you’re already a fan, I hope this collection of some of the best Alien fan art available will delight you, and if you’re not already, then I hope this artwork will entice you to give it a shot.